[MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A clone of
CP/M for the 8088 crufted together in 6 weeks by
hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products, who called the original
QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and is said to have regretted it
ever since. Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for
IBM on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including vaguely
Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O redirection,
and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and subsequent versions; as
a result, there are two or more incompatible versions of many system calls,
and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on basic things like what character
to use as an option switch or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting
appalling mess is now the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known
simply as DOS, which annoys people familiar with other similarly
abbreviated operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it
was attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name
further annoys those who know what the term
operating system does (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set
of relatively simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS
like “dose”, as in “I don't work on dose, man!”,
or to compare it to a dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide
circulation among hackers exhorts: “MS-DOS: Just say No!”).
See mess-dos.